Uber Covered Up The Fact That They Got Pwned Last Year

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am no fan of Uber. Thus when I woke up today in India and at the top of my news feed was the story that Uber go pwned in 2016 and appeared to cover it up, I got another reason not to like them. The pwnage took the names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million riders. The hackers also nabbed the driver’s license numbers of 600,000 Uber drivers. None of this is good. And it seems that the strategy for damage control is to via a blog post throw some shade on the previous regime led by the now ousted Travis Kalanick:

You may be asking why we are just talking about this now, a year later. I had the same question, so I immediately asked for a thorough investigation of what happened and how we handled it.

The blog post is an interesting read and I hope the company is very transparent about what happened here because being pwned is bad. Not telling anyone about it is worse. And you have to wonder if this will end up on Capital Hill in the form of the public flogging that is known as a Congressional hearing?

UPDATE: This story just got worse. Bloomberg is reporting that the company also paid hackers $100K USD to cover the hack up. That’s not good at all. I’m pretty sure that you can book that Congressional hearing based on this.